Mississippi Crests, but Davenport Doesn’t Crack

Sometime Tuesday, without fanfare or drama, the flooding Mississippi River quietly crested here. After several nervous weeks, the worst had come--and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

“Maybe it’s cresting now,” Public Works Director Dee Bruemmer said with a weary smile as she walked along a still-intact sandbag levee at midday. “Maybe it crested a few minutes ago, maybe in a while. Whenever, we’re doing pretty good.”

The Mississippi is so swollen--with 181 billion gallons of water flowing by each day, rather than the usual 69 billion this time of year--and so long, at 2,350 miles, that the crest of the flood will take up to 36 hours to pass.

That’s a lot of time for makeshift levees to collapse, sump pumps to fail, myriad disasters to unfold, everyone here knows. But on this windless, warm spring day--as ducks paddled through downtown streets alongside Coast Guard rescue boats--the city seemed to pause briefly, exhale and then get back to shoring up the dikes.

“Twenty-four, 36 more hours,” Bruemmer said. “One more day.”

The only major city on the Upper Mississippi without a permanent flood wall, Davenport has watched for more than a week as hundreds of homes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Illinois and northern Iowa went under. Thousands of volunteers--along with several National Guard units--have worked 24 hours a day here to erect numerous clay-and-sandbag levees to protect the downtown.

On Monday, fierce winds whipped the river into miles-long stretches of whitecaps, threatening to collapse walls both upstream and down. By Tuesday afternoon, however, as children ate ice cream cones and television camera crews worked on their tans between live shots, the smooth waters of the Mississippi were still a good foot below the top of the wall.

Don Cook’s margin was not quite so comfortable. “An inch and a half,” the 46-year-old shouted as he gunned his old outboard down his street, now 10 feet under. “I hope it really is cresting right now, because that’s all I have, an inch and a half.”

Cook--a ponytailed construction worker with the tanned face of a river rat--tied his boat to the screen-door handle and stepped into his half-remodeled house. The basement was full of water, the porch had gone under and the boat shed and garage were half full. But inside, the floor was dry.

A mallard paddled through his yard and took flight. Cook chuckled.

“We don’t want anybody feeling sorry for us,” he said, removing his extra-dark sunglasses. “We live down here because two weeks out of the year we get this and the rest of the time it’s heaven.”

More than 100 homes in Davenport--70 of them near where Cook lives west of downtown--have been damaged in the flood. Statewide, the figure is about 1,115 so far, according to Gov. Tom Vilsack, who on Tuesday formally requested federal assistance.

Just upriver in the town of Camanche, the water crested at 23.6 feet Tuesday, 6.6 feet over flood stage, and several homes went farther under water.

Across the river in Illinois, which tends to have steeper banks along this stretch, only a handful of homes flooded. Some were in tiny Niota, whose population of 105 is half what it was before the record flood of 1993--after which the state offered to buy out everybody in the flood plain, on the condition that they relocate to higher ground.

Downriver, just south of St. Louis, the town of Valmeyer, Ill., was high and dry Tuesday. After it was devastated in ‘93, the entire town relocated to a bluff 400 feet above the flood plain.

On Monday, Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh criticized Davenport and other river towns without flood walls as unnecessary tax burdens.

And on Tuesday, Davenport Mayor Phil Yerington--who, like many here, would rather clean up after floods than obscure the view of the Mississippi with a levee--fired back: “We don’t cry or complain when our tax dollars are used to clean up after a tornado, a hurricane or natural disaster somewhere else.”

The city, he pointed out, has purchased 52 homes in the flood plain in the last decade.

Late in the afternoon, as Cook loaded his boat with hip waders and prepared to take some friends on a tour of his still-dry home, he stood up for the mayor--a rarity, Cook acknowledged.

“All the levees on this river are half the problem, raising the water level for everybody else,” he said. “Davenport’s the only town that’s got it . . . together enough to let the river do what it wants to do.”